Connect Directly to SunLuxy Camera Streams

For a while now I’ve used a cheap SunLuxy H.264 DVR as the heart of the CoopCam project and initially couldn’t get a direct link to the camera stream so had to screen captured the bog standard web interface using VLC and break the feed down into separate streams but recently after a fair bit of trial and error I discovered a much easier solution!

I had researched on and off for months, went through masses of trial and error with various software and ultimately found no solution but after being inspired again I headed to the DVR’s web interface to start from scratch. I stumbled across source code in a file called /js/view2.js that constructs an RTMP:// address to show live camera feeds through the web interfaces flash player – See snippet of code below:

After removing the jargon the link came out as rtmp://dvraddress:port/ch#_#.264 with the first number being the channel you want to connect to (starting at 0) and the second being the stream (substream being 1 and main being 0)

I headed to VLC player, selected Open Network Stream and entered the following:

rtmp://192.168.0.100:81/ch0_0.264

Broken down you can see my DVR is on the local network as 192.168.0.100 at port 81 and that I wanted to view channel 1’s main stream, low and behold after a few seconds the camera started to play!

Notes

To convert the stream to something more useful you could use rtmpdump and ffmpeg on Linux systems – I’ll write another guide about that shortly

If you do something wrong and overload the DVR then you’ll hear a beep as the box reboots